Story of Amanda Lindhout’s nightmare in captivity impossible to put down

Catherine Ford, Calgary Herald09.14.2013

Amanda Lindhout was starved, beaten and sexually brutalized for more than a year after being taken hostage in Somalia in August 2008. She recounts her harrowing story in the book A House In The Sky.HO
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

Amanda Lindhout is shown in this undated handout photo. As she was driving to a rally to raise awareness about violence against women, Amanda Lindhout started to have doubts about her plan to speak publicly for the first time about how she had been raped and tortured while being held captive in Somalia.Christoph Strube/Dolce Publishing
/ The Canadian Press

This undated file photo released by the Brennan family on August 24, 2008 shows Australian freelance photographer Nigel Brennan, age 35, who was one of two foreign journalists abducted at gunpoint by rebels while visiting a refugee camp near the Somali capital Mogadishu. Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout and Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan were freed on November 25, 2009 after 15 months in captivity in Somalia, one of their kidnappers told AFP. AFP PHOTO / FILES / BRENNAN FAMILY / HO (Photo credit should read BRENNAN FAMILY/AFP/Getty Images)BRENNAN FAMILY
/ AFP/Getty Images

A House in the Sky, a memoir by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. Book cover

I ran out of Post-it notes. This fact is only relevant if, like me, you mark passages in books to recall and remember. My copy of A House In The Sky now sports a bristly yellow beard; there are that many marked pages, that much of this amazing book worth noting.

This review could begin and end with two sentences: Buy and devour this book for an unflinching look at the transformation of a young girl into a determined woman; from cocktail waitress to the driving force behind a non-profit foundation. A House In The Sky will have you in tears of rage and awash in dread, even as it is impossible to put down.

This first-person retelling of Amanda Lindhout’s kidnapping (with her ex-boyfriend) in Somalia is a harrowing account of how a young and idealistic young woman from a hardscrabble life in Red Deer and Sylvan Lake finds herself redemption and forgiveness. She was, over the course of 460 days, turned into a different person. It’s not the sort of experience to wish on anyone, and that Lindhout came out of it a better human being is one of the more astonishing consequences of her imprisonment by Somali thugs holding her for ransom money.

A House In The Sky is a book of deep emotion and it will, at times, bring you to the brink of tears. It is so well written (with the help of The New York Times contributing writer Sara Corbett) that it draws the reader inexorably into Lindhout’s life and her dreams of faraway places. Little wonder she chose the pages of National Geographic to escape a down-and-out existence on the edges of “acceptable” society. Her mother, pregnant at 16, takes up with an aboriginal teenager who beats her. Lindhout’s childhood, as she describes it, could have been ready-made for the Jerry Springer Show. No wonder she preferred an alternate reality.

She worked as a cocktail waitress in Calgary clubs, stashing every cent she could — one night including a $1,000 tip from a table of drunks — into a fund to allow her to actually visit the countries she had only dreamed about.

A prologue sets the scene, so there is a sense of immediate dread and in the first sentence of the first chapter that follows, she writes: “When I was a girl, I trusted what I knew about the world. It wasn’t ugly or dangerous. It was strange and absorbing and so pretty that you’d want to frame it. It came to me in photographs and under gold covers, in a pile of magazines.” That pretty world, as seen through glossy magazine pages, and the adventures she had in it, only makes what happened to her even more painful.

The first question is why on earth anyone would choose to go to Somalia in the middle of a war. She writes: “I’d like to say that I hesitated before heading into Somalia, but I didn’t. If anything, my experiences had taught me that while terror and strife hogged the international headlines, there was always — really, truly always — something more hopeful and humane running alongside it.”

She was proved wrong, but it’s doubtful she would look at it in that fashion today. Indeed, she was raped repeatedly, beaten, chained and tortured. She was treated as an object to be used and discarded, kept in an airless, windowless room, even as the man who was kidnapped with her was treated far more humanely for the simple reason he was male.

It’s painful to read, impossible to imagine anyone would come out of that experience a compassionate, feeling adult. But Lindhout does, even as she is unsparing of herself, her life and her sometimes-questionable choices.

The true brilliance of this book is how she takes the reader with her as she relives it all. She not only survives, but becomes stronger. Despair tries to grip her, but only partially succeeds. Rather than giving up, she visits her “house in the sky ... inside the shelter of my mind.” She imagines life after, makes herself promises that eventually she would “do something that mattered.”

And she does — establishing the Global Enrichment Foundation supporting development, aid and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya.

A House in the Sky is an impressive book, made even more so by its unflinching honesty. Lindhout and her co-author do not try to make her out to be a hero, to be the “good girl done wrong,” anything else but a woman who underwent a winnowing, being emotionally and physically reduced to a shadow of her former self. What takes its place is someone strong enough to forgive herself, after she has forgiven her captors. And that is a real-life miracle.

A HOUSE IN THE SKY by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett (Simon and Schuster; 384 pages; $29.99)

Catherine Ford is a retired Herald columnist

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Story of Amanda Lindhout’s nightmare in captivity impossible to put down

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